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Having got out of the business of being a professional hitman in the first thriller Quarry and clearing up some loose ends in Quarry's List (that's two novels worth of plotting, killing and screwing summed up in a few words), Quarry has a few ideas for a new career in Quarry's Deal . Unsurprisingly, it involves more killing and screwing. A lot more. Admittedly, there aren't too many career path options for a Vietnam veteran and professional killer. You can put a lot of distance and money between your past and future, but if you have the list of contacts - as Quarry does - you can take over as the new Broker and run the business. Quarry however has found another interesting new angle to pursue. He's planning to use the list to find out who the hitmen are, find out who they are going to hit, and get the potential targets to pay him to protect them from the killers who are now working for new brokers. His first job takes him to a Florida beach resort filled with weal...

Quarry's List was originally published in 1976 as The Broker's Wife, as a follow up to Quarry . It was never intended to be a series, but at least Max Allan Collins didn't kill him off like Nolan ( Two for the Money ) and then have to rewrite the ending to continue the series. He still had a problem though, as Quarry had more or less retired as a professional hit man in the first standalone book, or to be more accurate, he has "retired" his agent the Broker. When asked by his publisher to follow up, Collins was faced with the question of what is Quarry going to do next? Quarry, as we know for being introduced to him in first book, can be ruthless in his methods, in killing as much as in taking care of his own security. Despite the arrangement with his Broker as a killer for hire coming to an unfortunate end, and despite taking every precaution to leave the professional hitman business behind him, he know he needs to still be careful. He expects that eventually so...

Created in 1976, Max Allan Collins's Quarry is a man and a product of the times, a character who would take the genre of crime fiction in a new and daringly amoral direction. A Vietnam vet, Quarry gets in some marital trouble when return home, has killed a man and got something of a taste for it. Finding he has a need to live a little more on the edge, he recognises that working for a living as a hitman is amoral, but in Nam he has learned to accept life and death as meaningless. He has however also learned the importance of survival. Which means Quarry is not too impressed that his agent, Broker, has put him a risk when he sends him to kill a man who is carrying something valuable and it turns out to be heroin, so he puts a little of the product aside as future down-payment. Quarry's concerns about Broker's arrangements increase on his next assignment to take out an innocuous man in a small town in Iowa. Things don't seem right and sure enough after carrying out the hi...